When you are creating a new Write message, you can save a draft of the email either manually or automatically every x minutes.

When you send the email the draft is auto deleted as you now have a copy of the sent email in 'Sent' folder.

However, if you have not sent the email because it is still being composed, then the draft copy should remain in the selected Draft folder. Is this the situation you experience - the draft copies are unsent emails still being composed, but they disappeared?

Nope-- As you explain, drafts are normally deleted when they are sent--no problem. But, in this instance, while I was reading incoming messages from my Inbox, T-Bird flashed a message (that disappeared shortly thereafter) indicating that xx messages had been deleted from the Drafts folder. Since I had a small number of Drafts still in that folder, I don't know what drafts that T-Bird had just deleted. And none of those xx messages showed up at that time in my Trash folder. If messages were indeed deleted from my Drafts folder at that time, what were they and where did they go? Were they just "permanently" deleted, without any passage through the Trash (or any other) folder? Can I determine what was deleted and recover those deletions? (By the way, I got another like message about deletions just before I started this reply.) What's going on here?

To further clarify, there had been a small number of drafts that remained in my Drafts folder, as messages that were still in various stages of composition and which I had saved as drafts so that I could return to edit and send them at a later time. I can't tell which, if indeed any, of those saved drafts were deleted by T-Bird. I guess I'll only discover that when I later try to find a partially composed e-mail that should still be saved in the Drafts folder, but which is no longer there.

Providing you have not compacted the Drafts folder try this.

make hidden files and folders visible:

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Show_hidden_files_and_folders

In Thunderbird:

• Help > Troubleshooting Information
• click on 'Show Folder'
• a new window opens showing Profile folder.
• Close Thunderbird now.
• Click on 'Mail' folder
• click on mail account name
• look for 'Drafts' file (not Drafts.msf) and open using eg: 'Notepad'

When an email is deleted, it is 'marked as deleted' but not fully removed until compacted.

Emails that have been marked for deletion will have the following line:

• X-Mozilla-Status: 0008

Use 'Edit' and 'Find' to locate any emails which you can remember who they were from or date to locate the emails that were deleted or use '0008'.

Change all the 0008 to 0001 as below to unmark them.

• X-Mozilla-Status: 0001

then File > Save then close the file. Top right X.

Open Thunderbird and look in Drafts folder.

Check this:

• 'Tools' > 'Account Settings' > 'Disc Space' for the account name
• select 'Don't delete any messages'
• select 'aways keep starred messages'
• click on OK

Toad-Hall--I'd already marked my "Account Settings" appropriately prior to the deletion notification and I've already checked for deleted files after the notification, so far without any luck. The Drafts folder has not been compacted and hidden files were already marked to be visible. Even if I could find the deleted files somewhere and recover them, at least the following questions remain: 1. why were they deleted by T-Bird?, 2. how can that be prevented in the future (other than by never leaving any unsent files in the Drafts folder)? Based upon the notification and the fact that T-Bird did the apparent deletions on its own initiative, without any input or request by me, it sounds like something designed into T-Bird. What we really need is a T-Bird designer to address this and not for us users to have to try to figure out what was designed in.

When the deletion occured were you composing an email at the time or had a draft email open ready for composing?

What OS do you use and what version of Thunderbird?

No--I was not then composing an e-mail and had no draft e-mails open for composing. I was reading e-mails that I had received.

I am running Win7 64 bits and T-Bird is v. 24.4.0

Could you report as a bug at this link: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/index.cgi?

you will need to register.

Tell them your OS and verion of Thunderbird. Tell them you are using Pop mail account and Account Settings > Disc space is set to never delete messages.

Tell them exactly what occurred that you were viewing new mail when a pop up messsage stated that draft emails were deleted; make it clear that you were not viewing a draft nor composing a new message. Tell them you have no idea what draft emails were deleted and they do not show in 'deleted' folder.